adamisntdead's comments

adamisntdead | 4 years ago | on: Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

I'm currently a mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge and there's quite a few students who live type notes in various different formats. I think that the majority of the learning curve comes when getting used to the format of writing in LaTeX, and once you have that down (so that typing both prose and mathematics takes little to no effort) you can type notes faster than you can write them - with the small exception of maybe matrices and certain advanced things which slow you down.

The benefit of having typed notes at least for me come from being able to search, having a good record of my own understanding of a course and also not having to rely on keeping handwritten notes safe. They also look pretty which is a bonus for studying from them.

Examples:

- Analysis I (which have been edited): https://adamkelly.me/files/ia-analysis-i/analysis-i.pdf

- Graph Theory (not edited but diagrams added): https://adamkelly.me/files/ii-graph-theory/graph-theory.pdf

As a side note, one other thing I do is write short 'handouts' on topics that I think I have something to say about. For example https://adamkelly.me/files/handouts/direct-products/direct-p....

adamisntdead | 4 years ago | on: A layman’s guide to recreational mathematics videos

If we're talking about Fun maths, there's a couple of really good channels that look at Olympiad problems.

- vEnhance (https://www.youtube.com/c/vEnhance), an MIT student and IMO Gold Medalist who solved problems live on stream (and plays various games)

- Osman Nal (https://www.youtube.com/c/OsmanNal), looking at problems ranging from AMC/AIME to IMO 3/6s

- Michael Greenberg (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3mhbGC7kQgzkXT9fceNOwA), a geometry enthusiast who also live solves problems, though the production quality isn't amazing

And of course, Michael Penn (but that's in the post above)!

adamisntdead | 4 years ago | on: How we built the Evervault Encryption Engine (E3)

I'm surprised that something like point compression can even be patented, considering that it's relatively straightforward mathematically (all of the difficulty seems to lie in the number theory to compute a solution, which I assume wasn't invented by whoever owned the patent)...

adamisntdead | 7 years ago | on: Airlines face investigation for splitting up families on flights

I have been thinking about this sort of thing quite a lot - while I do think it's wrong to split people up on a plane, it is quite an interesting concept.

A similar but less malicious case would be one of organising the seating on a train or in a cinema, but rather then biasing against families, biasing against other, unrelated groups.

For example - in a cinema, you usually do not wish to sit right beside another group when the rest of the seats are free. Still, you don't want to be that far from the center.

How do you design an algorithm for this? How will it scale? How can you make the most number of groups happy with their seats? How do you avoid having individual seats that nobody wants?

adamisntdead | 7 years ago | on: Getting Started with Quantum Computing in Python

Quantum computing won't require much extra power that python can't provide, the only heavy processing will be circuit generation which is (as far as we can see at the moment) fine to use python for.

In the sort term though there's a big place for languages like C, C++ and Rust for things like simulations which need to be done

adamisntdead | 7 years ago | on: Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

As someone who read this with an editor full of OpenCL kernels, I think apple must really have missed the point of these sort of frameworks - heterogeneous computing.

If I wanted the best possible speed, latest features ect. I would write multiple back ends in things like CUDA.

I choose OpenCL because I can develop code on my Macbook pro, and run that on a computer with a discrete GPU on a different operating system, and have a fair amount of confidence that it would work.

:/

adamisntdead | 8 years ago | on: The Theory of Quantum Information

I am always impressed by the amount of content posted about Quantum Computing on hn. As a subject I find really interesting, it's really encouraging to see other people with the same interest, even if it is just casual!

adamisntdead | 8 years ago | on: A GPU-Accelerated Quantum Computer Simulator

Hello, author here - The choice to use rust mainly came from the fact I have more experience with it than with C++. Also, the compiler makes it really easy to write good code.

This, along with really simple testing, benchmarking and the ease of adding dependencies (through crates) made it a good choice. There are almost no downsides from using rust, provided you have experience with it!

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